There have been a few attempts to democratically oust
the deeply corrupt, CIA-engineered Zuma cabal from
power in South Africa - but none of them succeded.
This time it's different. This time the parliamentary
vote of no confidence will be by secret vote, due to
a court ruling.
Speeches are still ongoing and then we must await
the outcome of the manual ballot and count.
Former president, Thabo Mbeki has been measured
in his comments - not wanting to ice the cake too much.
Tick, tick, tick..... Fingers crossed.........
LATEST:
Dineo Bendile‏
@DineoBendile
12 minutes ago
#NoConfidence Mapisa-Nqakula says a leadership change through
anything other than a general election would amount to a coup.
Dineo Bendile‏
@DineoBendile
10 minutes ago
#NoConfidence Tlouamma calls on MPs to be brave and vote Zuma out
"even those who are natural born cowards" he says.
Pro and anti Zuma groups are outside parliament. This is the pro rally.
34 minutes ago
Doors of Parliament have been locked in accordance with the rules.
The voting booths are out in Parliament ahead of the secret ballot.
384 Votes Total
177 Yes 46%
198 NO 51%
9 Abstain 2%
WOW!
That amounts to civil war in the ANC
About 30 votes out of 384 made the difference
This is going to run and run
Here's an overview of the long term game:
Zuma no confidence vote:
The ANC is the loser, whatever happens
Roger Southall 07 Aug 2017 08:26
Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology,
University of the Witwatersrand
The governing ANC has got itself into one hell of a pickle. This week the National Assembly will debate an opposition motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma.
Were the motion to succeed, Zuma and his entire cabinet would be forced under the constitution to resign. The Speaker of the House would then become Acting President for up to 30 days while it goes about the business of electing a replacement, who would then serve as state president until the expiry of the present term of parliament in early 2019.
Yet the reality is that, save a political tsunami, the motion won’t succeed even though it’s common currency that Zuma is irredeemably corrupt and that he has sold his country out to the Gupta family. He has also alienated many of the ANC’s traditional allies, and the performances of the government and the economy under his rule have become increasingly shambolic.
Key figures in the ANC have indicated that their party’s MPs should vote with the opposition. These include former President Thabo Mbeki who has proclaimed that ANC MPs should vote in the national rather than the party interest. Similarly, the recently dismissed finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has urged MPs to allow their consciences to dictate their votes.
Despite such calls, only two ANC MPs, Makhosi Khoza and Mondli Gungubele, have openly declared that they will vote with the opposition. The ANC has indicated it will subject Khoza to disciplinary proceedings. Gungubele may well face a similar fate. If the ANC follows through on its threats, both may lose their jobs (for if a party expels an MP from party membership, the MP concerned can no longer sit in parliament).
There are certainly other MPs sitting on the ANC benches who recognise the damage that Zuma has done. But it appears they have been held back from speaking out because of the threat of dismissal from parliament and the loss of salary and status that would involve......
But even if enough ANC MPs were to align themselves with the opposition to unseat Zuma, the ANC would remain in control of the immediate situation because it would retain its majority in the House, and it would be another ANC MP who would be elected to serve as president.
Yet win or lose the vote, the consequences for the ANC are dire.
The party faces three possible options:
- The ANC wins the vote by a substantial majority, with only a handful of ANC MPs voting with the opposition. Supposedly this would be a massive victory for the ruling party, yet it will fly in the face of not just the parliamentary opposition, but a massive body of popular opinion throughout the country. The ANC would have voted to keep a deeply corrupt president in power, with probable long term disastrous electoral consequences. Any internal ANC “reform” project will be more likely to fail.
The ANC just scrapes home by a small majority, indicating that a substantial body of the party’s MPs have voted for Zuma to go. Cue internal party turmoil. Will the dissident MPs own up? If they do, will they face party discipline? What would happen if the dissidents were known to include party heavyweights (and potential candidates for the party leadership at the party’s national congress in December 2017) such as Cyril Ramaphosa and Lindiwe Sisulu? Subjecting them to party discipline would risk not just massive intra-party division, but a split within the party – and the further danger that they might team up with the opposition.
The ANC loses the vote, and Zuma is forced to stand down as state president. In this case, the ANC is openly divided, and all hell would break out within the party ahead of its conference in December. An ANC MP, probably Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, would be elected as state president, but Zuma would remain as party president.
The ANC would be at war with itself, with little or no prospect of it facing the electorate in 2019 in one piece. Were the ANC to offer Zuma an amnesty from prosecution, they would face a massive public backlash. If they didn’t, they would face the very real prospect of his having to face trial, with the party’s extraordinarily dirty linen being washed in public for the foreseeable future.
Whatever happens, Zuma will work ceaselessly and ruthlessly after the debate to secure the party presidency for his former wife, (and favoured candidate) Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, reckoning that in so doing, he will retain the power to shape events (and not least, to keep himself out of jail).
Meanwhile, those opposing Zuma will need to rapidly group behind one leader (presumably the new state president) if they are to stand a decent chance of securing enough control over the party organisation to defeat Dlamini-Zuma in December. Rivalry between the prospective anti-Zuma candidates for the party leadership (notably Ramaphosa, Lindiwe Sisulu and Mathews Phosa), would only weaken their chances of victory.
Ominous future
Tim Cohen, editor of Business Day, has indicated, sagely, that the Zuma presidency has begun to wind down as the #Gupta Leaks – the series of emails detailing the extent of the Gupta family’s control of the state – reveal more and more dirt. More and more ANC rats will desert the sinking ship and seek safety on a new (anti-Zuma) ANC vessel.
Yet even if the anti-Zuma campaign was to gain enough momentum for victory in December, it will come at massive cost. Not the least of these dangers is that the already alarmingly high rate of intra-party killing of rivals will increase.
It’s difficult to imagine that the ANC will be in any reasonable shape to face the electorate in 2019. Although ostensibly it may yet put on a decent show, it seems inevitable that it will lose numerous votes and a large swathe of MPs.
The looming danger is that in facing the risk of defeat, the party will be tempted to subvert a contrary result in the 2019 election.
Citizen power will save us
by Eusebius McKaiser
It’s worth taking stock of the latest episodes in the Gupta email leaks. They reveal the extent of the cancer that has ravaged our democracy. The prognosis looks grim and we must take some urgent decisions before the death of our society becomes an irreversible reality.
South African Revenue Service (Sars) boss Tom Moyane is choosing to not take us into his confidence about an ominously timed trip to Dubai at the end of 2015.
We know that all of the Gupta brothers were in Dubai at the time, as well as other key players in the state capture story such as Eskom’s disgraced chief financial officer Anoj Singh, who has been a key enabler for looting from our state-owned enterprises. Duduzane Zuma was also in town.
So too were Gift and Thato Magushule, the sons of Free State Premier Ace Magashule. We already know these names as part of the Gupta grooming technique. The Guptas know how to throw crumbs to the children of political principals. It’s an unsubtle tactic used to induce the loyalty of their parents in charge of provincial and national troughs.
Moyane himself has previously assisted in softening the blow for the Guptas over the Waterkloof landing scandal when he was part of a ministerial team that showed little appetite for holding this family accountable.
Moyane being coy about what he was doing in Dubai is important. We still do not have a proper explanation for a R70-million VAT refund from Sars in favour of the Guptas.
There is a scary truth emerging here with every new piece of information that comes out of the Gupta emails. We are seeing evidence of the total onslaught of the Guptas against the entire state.
They capture entire state departments. They clearly have been trying to capture the revenue services too. They captured the presidency. They understand the state structure intimately and know that you have to attack it at all levels if you do not want to be stopped.
What is the use of stealing if the criminal justice system will come after you? Well, then you ensure that your captured enablers who appoint men and women to key institutions meant to fight economic crimes do not appoint men and women with integrity. President Atul Gupta is no doubt very chuffed that someone as useless as Shaun the Sheep is in charge of the National Prosecuting Authority.
President Gupta must also be very chuffed that the Hawks are less scary than a noisy bunch of hadedas.
An ethical revenue services agency may yet be your undoing if you’re a thief. Sars has been a “proudly South African” outfit for a long time. You cannot be comfortable with your loot knowing that one Tom Moyane might be able to send his staff to audit your wealth. So you damn well try to capture him too. If you can capture the president and his family, and if you can capture Cabinet members and provincial premiers, then who the hell does the boss of Sars think he is not to be capable of being captured? If a minister of finance can be groomed then what makes a little taxman special?
That is the total onslaught strategy of the Guptas. They are fearlessly waging a war against our democracy and we are simply standing by as the governing ANC does nothing but mumble about how bad the situation now is.
The Guptas are so thorough that they even understand the gatekeeping role of a personal assistant, which is why they even captured the PA to Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brownose.
Now Minister Lynne Brownose comically wants to prove her commitment to fighting corruption by saying to the public: “The buck stops with my PA!” That is patronising bull. Your PA is not the one with the power to make board appointments inside the state. Your PA can only be in Dubai because she is being rewarded for her silence and administrative assistance in enabling the Gupta predators to steal from us.
The constitutional buck stops with the minister and the president. You are the ones who should resign. Sacrificing the PA is tragicomic in the bigger narrative of the state’s grand moral and political failure. Sacrificing a PA is as laughable as a soapie director deciding to inform the public that an extra on the set of Generations has been fired.
President Gupta must have laughed his behind off when he saw Brownose throwing the PA under the bus knowing that she herself might have to be thrown under the bus soon. Once they have no use for you, when your integrity is shredded and capacity for enabling looting neutralised, they abandon you.
Frankly, it might even be too late for the likes of Moyane, Minister Malusi Gigaba or Brownose to take us into their confidence about their appearances in the story of grand state capture.
What we now know is that Zuma isn’t the only one who is beyond the pale. A critical mass of public servants and senior ANC politicians is captured. And the capture narrative extends to the private sector too, with companies such as McKinsey and KPMG proving that unethical and illegal business practices are not the exclusive preserve of the state.
That means the Gupta onslaught against our democracy has not only attacked the state but also nonstate actors such as big business. That is why we dare not be complacent or get corruption fatigue when we read newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio.
Too many white South Africans during the apartheid years claimed they “did not know”. Ignorance in a time of open societies, openness facilitated by fearless investigative journalism and contemporary media, enhanced by technological innovations such as social media, is no longer an excuse reasonably open to any citizen.
We know. We know the extent of the rot in the state and we know the nonstate actors who help the corrupted public officials and elected politicians.
What we now need is mass public pushback in a visible demonstration of cross-class solidarity against the thieves. The Save SA marches need to look like a little picnic compared with much larger demonstrations demanding Zuma’s resignation and forcing the ANC to begin the slow process of much promised organisational renewal. In 2019 this must be bolstered with a more competitive election outcome. That is the only remedy left to stop the death of our society.